Changes to school and college teaching staff for the new academic year: teachers over 55 years of age will be able to request a reduction of two hours of class per week. As specified in the Official Journal of the Generalitat (DOGC) this Monday, teachers who benefit from this benefit will have to have reached the required age before September 1st and, for the first time, will not be required to remain at school during these hours. However, USTEC, the largest union in the sector, has expressed dissatisfaction with certain conditions of the agreement, and there is uncertainty about how all the staff who adopt the proposal will be replaced.

The Department of Education has reacted swiftly to the chaos it itself generated with the monumental error in allocating places for the next academic year. An error that has forced the process to start all over again: the rectification has been made in record time. Very well. But this is the only good news in the mess we've witnessed these past few days.

The 2025/26 school year will start normally. This was confirmed by the Minister of Education, Esther Niubó, in an interview on Catalunya Ràdio. The head of the department stated that after the error that has invalidated the allocation of 57,000 places The teaching staff is concerned about "the intervention of a person who made a unilateral decision" that "violated regulations." Someone ignored the department's resolutions and caused "serious incidents": 800 positions that should have been filled by civil servants were instead reserved for temporary teachers. Following complaints from some teachers, the Education Department halted the process and will announce the new assignments early next week after working all weekend to resolve the situation. In total, some 3,000 teachers out of 57,000 candidates will see their assignments change. However, according to Niubó, it will be for the better: "Given the exclusion of these 800 positions, it will improve."

Governments change hands and ministers change, but the Department of Education repeatedly botches up its performance. Perhaps the political class isn't getting ahead. Or perhaps there's a structural problem of malfunctioning within the department. Perhaps both. The fact is that the department's poor governance of the school world only provides additional and recurring reasons for complaint to a profession already sufficiently prone to defeatism.

Antoni Rossell Terris died four months ago, at the age of 88, in Sant Hilari Sacalm, La Selva. When his will was made public, the entire town learned exciting news: all the money he had earned during his life was left to the Anton Busquets y Punset Institute so that young people in Sant Hilari could study and enjoy quality education. Rossell Terris, who had no children but many nieces and nephews, learned the trade of tailoring at a very young age, making a fortune, but never had the opportunity to pursue higher education; a thorn in his side that, through this donation, he wanted to repair, thinking of the next generation.

The Department of Education considers the irregularities committed with the internship contracts at the IES Ebre in Tortosa –the largest in southern Catalonia– and has sanctioned the center's director and its administrator with six months without employment or salary, according to sources from the CGT and the Intersindical. The department's file comes a year and a half after the ARA denounced this situation thanks to two protected witnesses who opposed this operation and who had the courage to make it public.

"I hadn't seen him well for a long time. Until one day he told me: «Mom, I just want to die...»". Told through tears by his mother, Joel's story is a case –one more– of bullying. A chapter of suffering that it ends With the help of a psychologist and a change of center, which will be forever marked. There is much work to be done –one in four children are bullied– But awareness of bullying is also growing. The Department of Education and Vocational Training's case count increases each academic year: 347 in the 21-22 academic year; double that, 684, in the 22-23 academic year; and 52% more, 1,042, in the 23-24 academic year. May 2nd is, in fact, the International Day Against Bullying and Harassment at School.

Of all the disruptive decisions – to use an adjective that does not betray my indignant unease – that Donald Trump has made, the one with the deepest and most disturbing ideological significance is that of dismantle the federal Department of EducationThe government of the most powerful country in the world believes that education does not deserve its own department, as it has had for the past 45 years (it was created in 1979). It is true that federal states have the majority of powers, but the gesture of disregarding their own powers already reveals the importance given to education: something simply expendable. Trump and Musk believe it's fine if overnight they fire, as they have, more than a thousand officials from this department. Zasca!

Under 48 hours before a new day of industrial action in state schools, head teachers from 300 schools have signed a letter addressed to Catalan Education minister Josep Gonzàlez-Cambray, to which ARA has had access, in which they warn that the situation in schools is "unsustainable": "There is a real risk that the whole public education system will collapse and the functioning of state schools with minimum quality standards will no longer be guaranteed". The statement asks the minister for "measures not words" after "repeated" demands made by schools to the Department.

From being the the Department of Education's favourite to having no space to teach. Three years ago, the Department of Education announced that it would double the number of all-through schools in Catalonia, a formula that brings together infant, primary and secondary education – as many chartered schools do – with the aim of trying to reduce segregation and absenteeism in secondary education. Most of the new centers were created by adding the first year of secondary education to a primary school, a measure that, as well as the pedagogical reasons, was also "of budgetary efficiency", since it is cheaper to have more groups in a school that already exists than to build one from scratch. Despite the fact that the Catalan Education minister at the time, Josep Bargalló, guaranteed that no prefabricated modules would be used, three years later secondary school students in some centres continue to be housed in temporary modules in the palyground.

The discomfort of the educational community with the department has escalated rapidly since the announcement last week of the changes in the school calendar. The decision that the next school year will start a week earlier and with an intensive school day throughout September without any previous debate has caused the teachers' unions to explode, and this Thursday they have occupied the headquarters of the Department of Education and threaten to stay until the consellerjosep Gonzalez-Cambray, receives them and commits to reverse the changes. Shouting "Cambray, resign", the unions criticize "the opacity" of the Govern and, beyond the discrepancies with the measure, they are annoyed by how and when the measure has been announced, skipping the participation bodies such as Catalonia's School Council.

The Department of Education is in breach of the pact against school segregation it promoted alongside with the Catalan Ombudsman two years ago, one of the main problems of the education system. Although the agreement makes it clear that the administration has to protect "complex" centres, where students come from more disadvantaged backgrounds, the Generalitat assigned 6,101 children to these schools after the start of the 2019-20 academic year, a practice considered harmful for schools. In fact, one in three students who requested a place halfway through the year ended up in a "ghetto school", that is, a school with a much higher concentration of foreign students. The non-compliance is so great that 83% of "complex" schools in Catalonia enrolled students after the beginning of the year, which is explicitly forbidden by the pact and aggravates these schools' situation, according to a study by the Fundació Bofill.